PORT’S ART PROGRAM FACES AX

Commissioners weighing depth of cuts that could help close budget gap

For more on this story, tune into U-T TV on Cox Channel 114, U-verse Channels 17 and 1017.

During months of debate over the Port of San Diego’s projected $4.9 million budget shortfall, nothing got more attention than a small function that takes up less than 1 percent of the port’s budget — its public art program.

The debate focused on whether to eliminate the program or just reduce it, a significant turnaround for the port, which invested more and more in the art program each year during better times.

The program’s budget had grown from $650,000 to nearly $1.2 million in just the past three years. Since the mid-1990s, the program had also collected a surplus, now at $2.4 million.

As recently as 2009, with businesses and residents feeling the effects of the recession, port officials were developing plans to sustain and grow the art program with the goal of building “a world-class public realm along the tidelands.”

Even as port officials closed a multimillion-dollar shortfall for the budget year that will conclude June 30, the public art program remained intact.

Now with the port facing a larger shortfall for the fiscal year that will start July 1, the arts program became vulnerable.

“We’ve got to keep the ship afloat and moving first,” Port Commissioner Dan Malcolm said at a May 7 budget workshop. “If the ship is sinking, I don’t care how artistically we arrange the deck chairs, the ship is still going down.”

Port officials considered one proposal to eliminate the program and appropriate its entire surplus. Art supporters rallied, gaining support from San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, who appoints three port commissioners.

The commission then agreed to keep the program, with some level of cuts.

“If you don’t have a lot of money in your family’s budget for driving for one month, you wouldn’t sell the car,” Commissioner Lou Smith said at a May 7 meeting. “What you do is stop driving and save gas money and, to me, that’s what we have here with public art. I’d rather not dismantle the infrastructure that we’ve gone through great pains to create.”

As it stands now, the art program will receive $600,000 in the upcoming year, down from $1.2 million. Commissioners also signed off on taking $1.5 million from the program’s surplus. Final decisions about how to close the Port’s deficit will be made on June 11.

Among those unhappy with the cuts is Gail Goldman, a public art consultant and artist who has worked on projects nationally and locally.

“Public art is a significant contributor to the way we experience our physical environment,” Goldman said. “Particularly for the port, public art is something that actually has been proven to draw people and businesses to an area, and it really contributes to the economic viability.”

She’s also mystified that the commission turned away from its own recently minted art plan, especially since it’s a tiny part of the overall budget.

“The very group of people who endorsed it and said, ‘plan’ are essentially now saying ‘since you planned and you didn’t spend the money, we need it,’ ” Goldman said.